Author: Mary Gaitskill

Cites

• Enid Bagnold (1)
  • IN: The Mare (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The Browns…loved each other, deeply, from the back of the soul, with intolerance in daily life.
    FROM: National Velvet, (1935), Novel, UK
• Carson McCullers (1)
  • IN: Because They Wanted To: Stories (1997) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. . . . A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.
    FROM: The Ballad of the Sad Café, (1951), Short Story, US
• W. H. Auden (1)
  • IN: Bad Behavior (1988) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
    FROM: 1939-09-01 00:00:00, (1940), Poem, England/US
• Vladimir Nabokov (1)
  • IN: Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.
    FROM: Speak, Memory, (1951), Book, Russia